Digital Prints

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Mastering Digital Printing
Study the Test Data
If you’re relying on outside permanence test results, make sure you understand what the
test conditions and standards were and adjust your expectations accordingly. Make yourself
a checklist: Accelerated or real-time? Indoor or outdoor? Comparative or predictive?
Visual or measured? If measured, what device was used? What were the endpoints? If
results were extrapolated, what were the reference display conditions?
By looking deeply, you can start to really understand the meaning of any test result and
see if it matches your needs.
Contract Out Your Permanence Testing
The middle ground between studying and using the test data from others and doing the
testing yourself (next section) is having someone else do the testing for you.
If you had the money to spend you could actually contract the IPI/RIT or WIR organizations,
but we’re talking thousands of dollars per test, so that’s not very likely. The next
step would be to go to the “artificial weathering” companies like Q-Panel Weathering
Research Service or Atlas Laboratory Weathering Testing. They normally do industrial
testing in the fields of textiles, plastics, paints and coatings, etc., but they could also do
testing for you. For example, Q-Panel’s laboratory xenon lightfastness fade tests start in
the mid- to high-hundred dollar range, but the outdoor tests described earlier can cost as
little as $2.40 per specimen per year (Florida and Arizona outdoor exposures under glass).
Finally, you can contract with an individual who has experience and a well-established
method of doing this kind of testing. As we’ve already learned, there are many ways to test
permanence, so the first obvious hurdle is that you have to agree with the methodology
of the tester.
While this is not exactly the same as contract testing, Joy Turner Luke has an open offer
to be part of her ongoing lightfastness research studies. If you have combinations of inks
and paper that meet the needs of Luke’s testing, she will run both natural daylight and
xenon arc tests on your materials for a nominal charge of fifty cents per sample to cover
handling. If you are accepted into her program, she will furnish complete instructions on
sample preparation and will send test results upon completion. Contact her at:
joy.luke@verizon.net.
Do Your Own Permanence Testing
Can you do your own permanence testing? Absolutely. There are as many ways to conduct
a print permanence test as there are ways to make a print. However, it can be done,
and I highly recommend it.
Here are the basic steps of an actual lightfastness test I conducted:
1. Decide on what you want to test for. I decided to test the fading of four different inkjet
papers using the same desktop printer and inks.
2. Select test type, conditions, and testing procedure or standard. This is actually the most
important step, and many people rush through it without much thought. In my case, I did
an accelerated, comparative (relative), visual, lightfastness test.